Abstract
It was clearly recognized in the early sixties that rapid magnetic field line reconnection was required in order to account for the fast energy release in solar flares and also to cause convection in the magnetosphere and ionosphere. However, reconnection mechanisms based only on diffusion of magnetic fields due to electrical resistivity were much too slow to provide the required rates. It was suggested [Petschek, 1964] that slow and intermediate MHD waves would appreciably decrease the size of the diffusion region and therefore increase the rate of reconnection.
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© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Petschek, H.E. (1999). Thoughts On Reconnection. In: Büchner, J., Axford, I., Marsch, E., Vasyliūnas, V. (eds) Plasma Astrophysics And Space Physics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4203-8_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4203-8_2
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